Free Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas Preston Page B

this lightly and later, with an accomplice, lured him out on the Inglefield Fjord. There they shot and killed Uisâkavsak, "The Big Liar."

FIVE

    The Search for the Arctic Atlantis

    The American Museum of Natural History has over the years been unusually lucky; almost all of its expeditions have returned with valuable results and collections. The Museum's success with polar expeditions, however, came to an abrupt end with the Crocker Land Expedition—perhaps the greatest scientific failure in the Museum's history.

    In June of 1906, nine years after successfully recovering the Ahnighito meteorite, Peary stood on the summit of Cape Colgate in the extreme northwestern part of North America—only nine degrees from the Pole—and carefully scanned the northern horizon with his binoculars. He was the first explorer to have reached this headland, and before him lay a vast, uncharted area covering over a million square miles. Later he recorded what he saw: "North stretched the well—known ragged surface of the polar pack, and northwest it was with a thrill that my glasses revealed the white summits of a distant land."

    Several days later he stopped at Cape Thomas Hubbard, closer to the northwestern edge of the unknown land. It was a splendid, crystal-clear day, and Peary again trained his glasses to the northwest. He wrote:

The clear day greatly favored my work in taking a round of angles, and with the glass I could make out apparently a little more distinctly the snow-clad summits of the distant land to the northwest, above the ice horizon. My heart leaped the intervening miles of ice as I looked longingly at this land, and in fancy I trod its shores and climbed its summits, even though I knew that the pleasure could be only for another in another season.

    He estimated that the unknown land lay about 120 miles offshore, and he christened it Crocker Land, in honor of one of his financial backers.

    In 1913 the Museum set out on its most ambitious polar expedition to date—to discover, explore, and map Crocker Land. The Crocker Land Expedition lasted from 1913 to 1917. It was to be the first time in the Museum's history that an expedition became a spectacular failure.

    By 1910 much of northern Greenland, Ellesmere Land, and the area around the North Magnetic Pole had been explored, and Peary himself had finally taken the geographic Pole in 1909. The discovery and mapping of Crocker Land thus became a top priority of Arctic exploration. While some geologists and geographers questioned whether Crocker Land actually existed, most others felt that the question was settled and began instead debating its size and extent. In 1911 a tidal expert with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey studied Arctic currents and concluded that a great landmass or island archipelago stretched from northwestern North America across to eastern Siberia. This was confirmed by several reports that mountain peaks had been seen from northern Alaska over the ice horizon of the Polar Sea.

    Now that the North Pole had been exposed as an icy wasteland, Crocker Land became the object of extensive scientific speculation. Some believed that Crocker Land would turn out to be, in the words of Peary, "an isolated island continent, an Arctic Atlantis, with a flora and fauna of its own." "Volcanic ashes have fallen on Greenland," wrote explorer Fitzhugh Green. "The Aleutians are buried furnaces. If there be an ice-cooled desert, why not a steam-heated paradise?" The Eskimos themselves talked about a distant land, a sort of Shangri-la, dotted with herds of game and warmed by the sun. According to the Eskimos, all who came across this land chose not to return.

    The Museum had supported Peary on his expedition to the North Pole and other Arctic explorations, and so it seemed natural that the Museum should organize an expedition to Crocker Land. The discovery of a new landmass would not only bring the Museum fame and glory, but it would open up a whole new area for